Success Story
NeoConsult supplies a SOA-Based Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) Provisioning Platform for SFR in France. With the NeoConsult WLR provisioning platform SFR has been able to unite the complete WLR customer intake process in one single system and combined with the exceptional high degree of automation of the intake business processes, this has minimized SFR’s customer intake costs on WLR. SFR also benefits from the scalability of the system; today up to 10,000 customers per day are provisioned, and up to 2,000 customer service representatives are working on the system simultaneously. On top of this SFR has gotten a very reliable and robust system helping them to improve the overall customer satisfaction.
Intro
SFR is the second-largest telecommunications operator in France with 19.3 million mobile customers, 3.8 million high-speed Internet customers and €12 billion in revenue. SFR recently merged with Neuf Cegetel –the leading alternative mobile and fixed-line operator in Europe – and today SFR offers fixed line telephony services by reselling services based on France Télécom’s lines, using the WLR provisioning platform supplied by NeoConsult.
The WLR provisioning platform was originally supplied by NeoConsult to a major telecommunication company. However, in 2006 SFR aquired their fixed telephony and broadband activities, including the complete WLR platform.
Business Opportunity
During 2005 ARCEP (the French Telecommunications regulator) introduced a new regulatory framework – making it possible to establish flexible regulation that was more appropriate for wholesale markets and less rigid for retail markets. A part of this new framework was access to wholesale line rental (WLR), under the name VGAST (Vente en Gros de l'Abonnement au Service Téléphonique), where alternative suppliers got the opportunity to resell services based on France Télécom lines.
WLR allows alternative suppliers to rent access lines on wholesale terms from France Télécom and resell the lines to customers, providing a single bill that covers both line rental and telephone calls. Its introduction has been a significant stage in the development of competition in retail markets in France. A fully effective WLR product will bring major benefits to consumers in terms of increased choice, innovation, and lower prices. Consumers will have the opportunity to choose alternative suppliers who provide combined access and call services.
NeoConsult Solution
The WLR provisioning platform is based on the NeoConsult Nomad product. NeoConsult Nomad is a robust, reliable and scalable SOA-based framework. The WLR solution was installed with SFR in 2006, and today it handles the provisioning of up to 10,000 customers per day. Through the use of load balancing and advanced database techniques, more than 2,000 customer service representatives (CSRs) can have access to the system simultaneously without significant impact on the performance of the system. SFR’s Nomad system has a 99.9% up time. A structured change-request procedure, and the fact that the solution is SOA based, ensures that required business or regulatory system changes can be done very fast and easy and with a minimum risk of jeopardizing other parts of the system.
Why SOA
Service-Oriented Architecture isolates the business logic in one or more separate systems, which interface with a number of reusable services. Each service is by itself an isolated sub-component, and in many cases it is based on open standards. The SOA approach enables a high degree of reusability, as many of the different services are used in several business processes. This way the liberation of existing assets on the one hand ensures significant operational cost savings and/or rapid development of new solutions (faster time-to-market), and on the other hand ensures improved business processes and more tailored applications. SOA governance helps to ensure discipline and control throughout the lifecycle of the complete process. All this inevitably leads to improved customer satisfaction.
Contact
To learn more about the WLR provisioning solution, our other solutions or services, please contact sales@neoconsult.com
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SFR reference (pdf)